The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [74]
Mevrouw Vorhulst let him shake her hand, but didn’t protest as he left. “Actually,” she observed to Ranjit and Myra, “that sounds like an excellent idea. I’d love to hear that talk.” Then, turning to Myra, she said, “Dear, do you remember the room we used to put you to sleep in when your parents were going to be really late? It’s still there, right next to Ranjit’s. If you’d like to use it from time to time—or as often as you like—it’s yours.”
So when he went to sleep that night, Ranjit had to count that a good day. He had very little experience in public speaking, and that worried him a bit. But right there was Myra’s head on the pillow next to his own, and, all in all, things seemed to be going very well for him at last.
The auditorium that the university donated for Ranjit’s press conference was quite big, and needed to be. Every one of its 4,350 seats was filled, and not just with newspeople. There were several hundred of those, but it seemed half of Sri Lanka had decided it wanted to be there as well. Besides the lucky 4,350, an additional 1,000, nearly, watched on closed-circuit television in another campus hall, leaving quite a few extremely important (or so self-described) other people consumed with indignation over having to watch the event on (ugh!) broadcast television.
To Ranjit Subramanian, peering out at them through a peephole in the curtain, they looked like a great many people. It wasn’t just the number of the human beings in the room, either. It was the particular human beings they were! The president of Sri Lanka was seated in the front row. Two or three possible candidates for the next election were there, and so was the Vorhulst family, and—believe it or not!—so was Ranjit’s old math professor, not having the grace even to look as embarrassed as he should have felt but instead smiling and nodding to everyone in a less favored seat than his.
As the curtain began to rise, the man sitting in the armchair next to Ranjit’s gave him a reassuring look. “You’ll be fine,” said the august Dr. Dhatusena Bandara, unexpectedly having flown in from his hush-hush UN job just to introduce Ranjit. “I wish Gamini could have been here, and so does he, but he’s busy recruiting in Nepal,” he added, and then the curtain was up and the lights were on him, and—without explaining just what it was that Gamini had to go to Nepal to recruit—Dr. Bandara moved to the lectern.
And then, sooner thereafter than Ranjit would have imagined possible, it was he who was at the lectern, and every pair of hands in that hall began to clap.
Ranjit waited patiently for the sound to stop. When it didn’t seem to be stopping, he cleared his throat. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you all.” And then, as it abated only slightly, he began:
“The man who presented this problem to me—well, to the world—was named Fermat, an advocate, or lawyer, in France a few centuries ago—”
By the time he got to the famous jotting in the margin of a page of Diophantus the applause had subsided, and the audience was intent. They weren’t quiet throughout the talk. They laughed when he commented that a lot of trouble could have been saved if the book Fermat had been reading had had larger margins. And they applauded again, though not in quite as unruly a fashion, as he described each step in his growing comprehension of what Fermat had been talking about. Then, when he described Sophie Germain’s work and how that turned out to be the key at last, they applauded a lot. And kept on doing so at every opportunity until Ranjit reached the moment when he had become pretty sure, or at least pretty nearly sure, that he had by-God actually completed a defensible proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.
He stopped, smiled, and shook his head at them. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to memorize a five-page mathematical proof?” he asked. “I didn’t have anything to write with, you see. I couldn’t write it out. All I could do was go over it, over and over again, repeating each little step, I don’t